ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the subjective experience of ‘writing a place’ from the perspective of a creative writer. I consider what I mean by my ‘imaginative landscape’, the geographical area which preoccupies much of my creative work, and identify this as South Yorkshire and The Peak District. Examining my own poetry and prose, I explore two different engagements with place. The first of these is an ‘independent’ engagement through two poetry collections and a novel. The second is the creative work produced during my tenure as Derbyshire Poet Laureate from 2013–2015, a role which required a very specific – and often collective – way of responding to the landscape and culture of The Peak District. I outline the difference between these two approaches but also how they might overlap or feed into one another. I argue that my creative engagements with place are unified by a belief in what I call ‘ghost-rhetoric’: a belief in the equal value of fictional accounts in the constitution of place and, in particular, a focus on ghost stories as emblematic of this.
